The raw material of exploitation: Harry Braverman's 'Labor and Monopoly Capital'

By Doug Enaa Greene

August 26, 2015 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Work sucks. Every day, workers go into jobs they hate, whether in a factory, office or on a checkout line. Workers are made to perform menial and demeaning tasks that have already been outlined for them, down to the smallest details, by management. Their job is so simple that anyone can do it. Ultimately, the worker possesses no control at the workplace.

How that situation came about and what it means for class struggle is the subject of Harry Braverman's classic work, Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman's book not only unveils how work is degraded under capital, but remains an important resource for how we understand capitalist society, working-class consciousness, and the class struggle today.

Biography

Harry Braverman was born on December 9, 1920. He was the son of a shoemaker, who desired an advanced education, but the hard times of the Great Depression meant that he was forced to leave college after a single year. Subsequently, Braverman worked as a craftsman in a number of trades (his experiences would later find their way into his masterwork) ranging from coppersmith to pipefitting to sheet metal work.

Braverman was not only a worker, but a journalist, Marxist and political militant, who joined multiple organizations such as the Young Socialist People's League, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist League. He also worked as an editor for the leftist Grove Press, where he was instrumental in publishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

In 1967 Braverman became managing director of Monthly Review Press, a non-sectarian socialist publishing house in the United States, a position he held until his death in 1976. In 1974, he authored the acclaimed book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.[1]

Labor and Monopoly Capital

A. Labor process and scientific management

Braverman wrote Labor and Monopoly Capital based upon his own work experiences, with the aim of looking at “the structure of the working class, and the manner in which it had changed.”[2] He did this by focusing on and developing upon Karl Marx's analyses of the processes of production, specifically changes in the labor process. Braverman studied how the capitalist class sought to control the labor process through the methods of scientific management, such as Taylorism, in order to not only control costs, but to control workers.

As a result of the application of scientific management, workers are stripped of any specialized knowledge in both their jobs and the labor process, being reduced to carrying out simplified tasks, where they are treated as interchangeable parts.

As Braverman puts it:

The end result is that labor under capitalism is debased and a hated toil to workers, but it serves the interests of capitalists since that enables them to extract the largest surplus product from an unwilling population.

Braverman's book not only revived interest the long-neglected study of the labor process, but was a challenge to the reigning wisdom of orthodox bourgeois academics and sociologists. According to Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster, Braverman provided “the first clear, critical understanding in more than a century of the labor process as a whole within capitalist society.”[4]

Before discussing the particulars of Braverman's argument, we need to clarify what he means by labor and the labor process. Braverman, who follows Marx, says that labor is essential in order for humanity to make history because people need to be able to live before they can write poetry, build skyscrapers or paint. Therefore,

Specifically, the work of humans is similar to that of animals, whether bees, spiders or beavers, in that both act upon nature in order to make it suitable for their own needs. Yet the work of humans is fundamentally different since the labor of the former is done consciously, while the latter is instinctual. Marx describes the difference as follows:

In other words, through the course of evolution, humans have come to labor consciously. This ability to labor, with both purpose and intelligence, is what distinguishes us from animals and makes us human. It is through human labor that civilization has emerged with art, culture, architecture, technology, clothes, literature, etc. It is through our ability to labor and create that we can truly express our humanity. Without the ability to labor, humanity would just be another animal.

Basic to the labor process, throughout all of human history, no matter the mode of production, according to Marx, are the following characteristics: “1), the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, [as described above] 2), the subject of that work, and 3), its instruments.”[7]

The organization of the labor process and the extraction of surplus to ensure the reproduction of society has existed in different modes of production. Marx identified several modes of production: slavery, feudalism, Asiatic (or tributary) and capitalism. None of these modes of production are eternal, but are subject to different laws of motion, and the class struggle between the immediate producers and the dominant classes for control over the surplus.

In different modes of production, there is an economic base along with a political, legal, ideological superstructure. Yet the class struggle under each is not determined in advance, but can end in several ways: either the transition to a new mode of production or the common ruin of the classes. Marx does not posit a view of society where the base wholly determines the superstructure, but rather there exists a relative autonomy between the two, with the superstructure also influencing the base in a shifting and dynamic relationship with the economic determinant in the last instance.

In volume three of Das Kapital, in a much clearer manner than the more well-known Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx sums up the dynamic relationship between base and superstructure as follows:

In order for the capitalist mode of production, based on commodity exchange and the pursuit of profit, to take hold throughout society, three things need to occur. First: workers need to be separated from the means of production. Second, workers need to be free from the legal constraints of slavery or feudalism in order to freely sell their labor power. Last, the function of production is not for human needs, but to expand the profits available to the capitalists.[9] Thus, the worker needs a job, because without employment they will starve. The potentially infinite creative powers found in human labor is recognized by capital, which sees it as the main instrument to expand its profits. Thus, the very ability of humans to create is turned against them, serving to enrich another class, and workers are in the end alienated from our labor.

However, due to the incessant drive for capital to expand, it is imperative that it gain control over the labor process. Initially, “the capitalist utilizes labor as it comes to him from prior forms of production, carrying on labor processes as they had been carried on before.”[10] This means that under early capitalism, production was carried out not under a single workshop, but by smaller units that still used traditional methods. Craftspeople and skilled laborers maintained control over the immediate process of production and jealously guarded their skills.

In the early factories, workers were willing accomplices in their own exploitation through the“putting out” system of domestic labor, subcontracting and piece work. However, Braverman says these were not yet capitalist forms of management, since the capitalists did not have control over the labor process. Although there were different precedents for the large-scale use of labor, such as slave plantations and ancient building projects, the control of management remained rudimentary. There were efforts by early capitalists to control their workforces by regulating the hours of work in order to impose a common pace of production, fines within factories for infractions and the development all kinds of legal coercion.All of this was done in order to dominate the working class and accustom them to capitalist management.

As capitalism developed, it brought with it the creation of large factories, which employed thousands of workers. One of the major principles regulating factory life was that of the division of labor. While the division of labor is characteristic of different modes of production, whereby different productive tasks, crafts, etc. are distributed throughout society, this was taken to an extreme under capitalism. According to Braverman, the difference between the division of labor under capitalism and other modes of production was that “as against this general or social division of labor, there stands the division of labor in detail, the manufacturing division of labor. This is the breakdown of the processes involved in the making of the product into manifold operations performed by different workers.”[11] While the division of labor throughout society was enforced chaotically by the market, within the factory it was implemented through conscious planning, where the capitalists sought to break down skilled jobs to their most basic elements.

As Braverman puts it:

It needs to be stressed that throughout each change in the labor process, there was resistance by the working class who refused to submit to capitalist control and were determined to protect their skills.

While bourgeois theorists such as William Petty and Adam Smith pointed out the advantages of the division of labor, it was Charles Babbage who, in 1832, first clearly laid out the principles of scientific management. After discussing the advantages of the division of labor, Babbage states:

For Babbage, management meant dividing up a craft into its smallest and simplest parts, so that the workers who can perform the task, can be hired as cheaply as possible in order to increase profits for the enterprise. However, it was more than 50 years after Babbage wrote that the first “experts” in management arose to formulate new theories and techniques. By the turn of the 20th century, not only had factories grown larger, but the era of free competition was giving way to monopoly capitalism and imperialism. As a result of these changes to the capitalist economy, there was an effort to systematically and purposely apply science to production. The theories of scientific management, developed by Frederick Taylor is not a science since it accepts the outlook of the capitalist with regard to production. Scientific management enters the workplace with the explicit purpose of subjecting labor to capitalist control.

The three basic principles of scientific management elaborated by Frederick Taylor are as follows:

For Braverman, there is no underestimating the effect of Taylorism on the labor process. It was not just about promoting efficiency, but developing the practice of managing workers in a capitalist society. Skilled crafts were systematically destroyed. The pride of workers in their jobs was stripped away and they were made into little more than cogs in an infernal machine. Trade unions and workers did resist the rise of Taylorism, but they were unable to stop its spread. The great creative power of human labor was reduced for tens of millions of workers to tasks as degrading as turning screws for hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades.

Science under capitalism is no longer a “neutral” force but becomes an adjunct to capital, aiding in disciplining the labor force. As Marx observed, the vast productive power of machines, created by human labor, was ultimately turned against their creators, becoming a force for their enslavement and alienation.

Scientific management is not limited to the factory or the assembly line, but spread to other branches of industry, whether in service, transport or administration. Just as Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times showed the assembly-line worker ground under the iron heel of capital, one need only watch modern films such as Clerks, Office Space or Waiting... to see that scientific management and the debasement of labor is not ancient history, but remains embedded within the matrix of capitalism.

As Braverman describes it:

Yet Braverman says, the process of turning workers into “talking tools” (as the ancient Romans called their slaves) “is an incessant and unending process. The condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because it violates human conditions of work; and since the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical, intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always remain in some degree a threat to capital.”[16] Capital is continually expanding, the means of production are always being revolutionized, new firms are rising while others decline and workers resist their own subordination. Yet no matter how much profit grows or how fine-tuned scientific management becomes, it is never enough. Capital needs to expand no matter what the cost may be to workers.

B. Monopoly Capital

Braverman, following the theories of monopoly capitalism developed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in Monopoly Capital, believed that a substantial change came over capitalism at the end of the 19th century. Braverman's book can be said to complete Baran and Sweezy's study in Monopoly Capital, which did not discuss the labor process. This neglect was recognized by Sweezy, who did praise Braverman for a “solidly successful effort to fill a large part of this gap”.[17] Our task here is not to offer an in-depth discussion or a critique of Baran/Sweezy's theory of monopoly capital -- that may be a subject for a future essay -- but to discuss what Braverman saw as the defining features of monopoly capital that shaped the modern working class.

According to the Baran/Sweezy thesis: at the end of the 19th century, competitive capitalism was transformed into monopoly capitalism with

These vast new enterprises now dominate whole branches of industry with monopolies, but they also have to manage greater numbers of workers. This outline of Monopoly Capital generally follows theories of imperialism developed earlier by Marxists in the 20th century, such as Nikolai Bukharin and V.I. Lenin.

As monopoly capitalism develops, the limits of the old competitive forms of enterprise are overcome with the emergence of the corporation. This allows capital to not be limited by personal fortunes or the capabilities of their owners or a small group of investors. With the development of the corporation, according to Braverman, the link is severed “between capital and its individual owner, and monopoly capitalism builds upon this form. Huge aggregates of capital may be assembled that far transcend the sum of the wealth of those immediately associated with the enterprise.”[19] With the growth of corporate power and the severance between ownership and management, a new stratum of managers is needed to administer these immense functions. Although managers largely come from a ruling-class background, capital is open to co-opting those with “talent” from below.

The modern corporation also follows the principles of scientific management, being subdivided among many departments that possess responsibility for different aspects of the production process: planning, research, production, work study, purchasing, marking, training, etc.[20]

Furthermore, marketing became the second major subdivision of the corporation, "subdivided in its turn among sales, advertising, promotion, correspondence, orders, commissions, sales analysis, and other such sections. At the same time, other functions of management were separated out to form entire divisions.”[21]

Advertising is needed to absorb the growing surplus. The corporation itself becomes an immense labyrinth of departments and sub-departments, with their own accountants and managers, seemingly divorced from the other, yet bound together in service to the bottom line of the company. Even the worst aspects of centrally planned economies don't match the organization of the modern corporation in their absurdity.

Braverman says that due to the great size of the corporation, management has become a vast hierarchy with many different levels that have the

The massive growth of corporations, as shown in the aftermath of World War II, highlights the need for coordination of production and society, in what is still an economy governed by the unplanned laws of competition.

Following Baran and Sweezy, Braverman believes that corporations have grown so productive that now big business can set high prices while cutting costs. This ultimately produces a state of stagnation in the capitalist economy. John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney outline the argument as follows:

Monopoly capitalism also leads to immense changes in the capitalist state. Due to the growth of economic surplus that cannot be easily absorbed, society grows more vulnerable to crises with roots in stagnation. Second, the vast expansion of capital “with respect to markets, materials, and investments---rapidly created a situation of economic competition which brought in its wake military clashes among capitalist countries.”[24] All of this creates the need for a war economy to absorb the economic surplus. While this may provide a temporary outlet for capital, it can lead to “regional” wars such as in Vietnam or to clashes between the major imperial powers, such as the first two world wars. Third, inside capitalist societies, there is the growth of poverty and insecurity alongside urbanizationthat private services are helpless to combat. This increases the need for government social programs ranging from welfare to prisons to education to cope.[25]

As we know from Louis Althusser, “the reproduction of labor power takes place essentially outside the enterprise"[26] through interpellation by the various Ideological state apparatuses: “one Ideological State Apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent! This is the School.”[27] The ideology, inoculated through the schools -- produces people as subjects that can minimally function in capitalist society by performing their jobs, follow orders, read and write, and willingly accept their subordination.

The advent of monopoly capitalism not only brings changes in the labor process, the organization of capitalist firms and the state, but throughout all the aspects of society. Agriculture and the “idiocy of rural life”, which were once peripheral, are now subjected to the discipline of the market. The drive of industrialization and urbanization breaks down old modes of life. Domestic life changes as the pressures of family and earning a living compel women to enter the factories. The old handicraft industries crumble as mass production cheapens goods, which are promoted by advertisements. Independent incomes create a market that makes it easier for people to buy goods as opposed to producing them.[28] According to Braverman:

One of those “profound psychological patterns” is the emergence of “free time”, which is now dependent upon the market to fill that time with television shows, sports and all kinds of artificial wants. This is all manipulated by the market, which builds hype for the latest blockbuster or the newest clothing accessories. As Walter Benjamin once provocatively said, "Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshiped."[30] No form of art or entertainment is allowed to escape the lustful eyes of the CEO. What was once “subversive”, “underground”, or a peculiar subculture is given mainstream status and subjected to the discipline of the market as soon as it proves to be profitable.

In monopoly capitalist society, real human and communal bonds break down, producing the mentality of dog-eat-dog and hyper-individualism. Yet there are many who can't function or get by in this society. They resort to crime or are deemed “hopelessly dependent”, “deficient” or “mentally ill.” The institutions created to deal with the downtrodden assume the “most barbarous and oppressive forms” ranging from government unemployment agencies, prisons and hospitals.[31] Yet for capital, all these morbid symptoms are accepted and praised as part of the “best of all possible worlds” since this creates a universal market where “the inhabitant of capitalist society is enmeshed in a web made up of commodity goods and commodity services from which there is little possibility of escape except through partial or total abstention from social life as it now exists.”[32]

As the totality of society is reshaped by the relentless march of capitalism, new industries are created to cater to new needs. These are the service industries such as restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, which can absorb new workers. Many of these new workers are women, who now “perform one of the functions they formerly exercised in the home, but now in the service of capital which profits from each day's labor”.[33] Many of the early forms of clerical work were likened to a craft, whether accounting or record keeping, filing, etc. However with the development of the modern corporation and the office manager, the principles of scientific management take hold here too.[34]

Office management develops as its own specialized branch with its own rituals, textbooks and methods. It is held by the office managers that “all forms of clerical work, not just routine or repetitive ones, could be standardized and ‘rationalized’”.[35] This “rationalization” can be seen in fields ranging from computer programming to cashiering, as mental labor on the part of the worker is reduced to a bare minimum with knowledge for the job guarded closely by management.[36]

As skills decline in these industries, they are increasingly filled with those who are paid less, such migrant workers and women of color. Monopoly capitalism winds up reducing “some two-thirds to three-fourths of the total, which appears readily to conform to the dispossessed condition of a proletariat.”[37] On top of this, labor grows more precarious with the threat of unemployment hanging over the heads of workers like a sword of Damocles

Other Marxist contemporaries of Braverman, such as Nicos Poulantzas, held that service workers were non-productive workers since they did not produce surplus value and were part of the petty-bourgeoisie due to their ideology and politics. For one, Poulantzas, in contrast to his own stated methodology, made political and ideological factors override the economic level. Furthermore, Poulantzas overstates the difference between productive and non-productive labor as criteria for determining who is a proletarian and petty bourgeoisie. For the capitalist, it doesn't matter whether someone is a steel worker, a janitor or a technician. Rather what matters according to Braverman,

In other words, surplus value is not just extracted from manual workers in mining, but from service workers in call centers or grocery stores, since all of them contribute to the accumulation of profit by the capitalists. Whatever differences may exist between a boilermaker and a cashier, they all belong to the same class.[39]

Despite the frightening view of capitalist control over the labor process presented by Braverman, he remains optimistic about the possibilities for working-class revolution inside the heartlands of capital:

Objections

A. Taylorism

Despite the overwhelmingly positively reception of Braverman's work, there are a number of criticisms have been raised that are worth engaging with. The first criticism involves Braverman’s describing Taylorism as a typical managerial strategy. Yet as the British Marxist David Renton observes, “as any number of academic experts in industrial relations have pointed out, Taylor's full strategy was only rarely adopted as a whole”.[41] In fact, managerial strategy has utilized a diverse number of methods, not all of them influenced by Taylor. Alongside Taylorism's time clock and motion studies, there are management strategies where workers consensually participate in their own exploitation.

Andrew Friedman says that managers will use despotic control alongside encouragement and consensus. Yet as Renton points out, those who criticize Braverman for insisting on the importance of Taylorism have not refuted his argument “that capitalism is a process out of which workers have increasingly been denied real control over their work”.[42] And there is of course a question of how far consent on the part of workers can go, and as we know, managers remain conscious of resistance, and are willing to offer concessions or to resort to direct coercion as needed.

Furthermore, Richard Edwards in a review of Labor and Monopoly Capital says that Braverman accepts the claims of Taylorism at face value, ignoring the ideological sources of his information, and that he neglected to look at the real labor process. Yet as Dan Clawson (another Marxist studying the labor process) counters, Braverman not only did describe the real labor process (as any reader of the book can observe), but that he “was particularly insightful in his ability to recognize what parts of Taylor's work were of real importance and what parts were simply ideology”.[43] Braverman was not so much concerned with the specifics of Taylorism, but how its introduction marked a crucial change in capitalist management strategies to control the labor process.

B. Women

Other criticisms have been leveled against Braverman from socialist-feminist or feminist perspectives, such as from Rosalyn Baxandall, Elizabeth Ewen and Linda Gordon. The three accuse Braverman of ignoring the experiences of working women and the issue of domestic unwaged reproduction done by housewives.[44] Braverman responded by pointing out that a consideration of housework fell outside the bounds of his study and that it is not actually as central to women's liberation as it appears on the surface:

Braverman's argument here rests on accepting that the role of the family has been fundamentally transformed under monopoly capitalism: with the functions of the family being taken over by institutions in society such as schools and hospitals. While there have been changes in the structure of the family, they are uneven. Women have entered the workforce in greater numbers and there is easier access to contraception and increasing divorce rates. Yet the family remains an important institution, in terms of reproducing the dominant social relations and ideology, which still depends on the subordination of women.[46]

Although Braverman, far more than many of his contemporaries, did make a sustained effort to discuss the experiences of women in his chapters on the service economy and the industrial reserve army, his analysis on the experience of women remain deficient.

C. Class struggle

The final objection to Braverman is far more serious: his neglect of the class struggle and changes in working-class consciousness. This was a criticism that Braverman recognized, stating that Marxism was not an academic pursuit, but a tool for combat. Yet it was his interest in class consciousness that caused Braverman to undertake this study. In fact, his whole analysis of Taylorism is built on the premise that craft workers will guard their skills and resist the encroachments of capital.

However, Braverman stated that his goal was to look at the “working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself”.[47] In order for him to discuss the current state of class consciousness, Braverman said it was necessary to satisfy two conditions:

Having undertaken a concrete investigation of the state of working class as a class “in itself” Braverman actually enriches our understanding of class struggle. He laid the necessary ground work, knowing that others would build upon his work to look at the struggles and consciousness of the workers as a class “for itself”.

Working class today

A. Consciousness and forms of struggle

That means it is our task as revolutionaries, to pick up where Braverman left off. To that end, we will offer some preliminary sketches (not final verdicts) on the following three questions: how should we understand class consciousness? What are some forms of working class resistance? What is the state of the US working class today? All of these questions will help us to understand how relevant Braverman's study is for class struggles today.

When it comes to understanding the dynamics of class consciousness, Braverman offers a few points that we should follow in our investigation. Braverman mainly looks at class not as a subjective “making” (favored by Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson), but rather deals with changes in the labor process and the composition in the current state of the working class, which is determined by the social relations of production that extract surplus labor. Yet Braverman says that even though the objective is primary to defining a class, ultimately:

Therefore, when looking at the working class, we should expect to find uneven levels of consciousness that range from a minority who may be influenced by socialist/communist ideas and others who are proud white supremacists or support capitalism wholehearted along, with a majority in-between. Most working-class people will probably not possess a single coherent ideology or conception of the world, but a mixture of many that are absorbed in fragmentary and contradictory ways.

For instance, workers may support trade unions and oppose foreign military intervention, but be a dedicated member of the Republican Party. Another worker could be a self-described socialist who proudly waves the Stars and Stripes. All these ideas contribute to people refusing to challenge their oppression and capitalism, but to accept them as natural. To them, the reigning social order and its values appear as just “common sense”. The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci defines common sense as “a conception which even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential, in conformity with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is.”[50] It is important to recognize that common sense is not a rational or coherent view of the world, but accepts all kinds of myths and beliefs as “natural” such as “blacks are lazy” and “workers should not be mistreated on the job”. All of these views mix in with other elements that are reactionary, but others that may contain the seeds of socialist or communist consciousness.

Due to how ingrained bourgeois hegemony and “common sense” is among people, they cannot always be combated with rational ideas or a better argument.

However prevalent “common sense” may be among workers, this does not prevent class struggle from erupting. The working class, as the source of the profit for the capitalist class, is compelled to rebel against low wages, unsafe conditions, long hours and the sheer alienating nature of work. As Marx and Engels said:

For example, the sight of scabs crossing a picket line can cause even a diehard a Republican Party worker to violently attack them for violating the basic rules of solidarity.

Due to the constant of class struggle in society, with workers’ uneven levels of consciousness, there have always been brush fires of resistance (some of it unseen). There are all kinds of individualized forms of resistance and “social contracts” between workers on the job to resist the boss and to make work as bearable as possible. For millions of workers, this is only natural because when you are on the clock, you are not free, you belong to someone else and are a disposable person.

On the job, even the most studious worker will find a way to slack off once in a while. Sometimes a worker comes back a little late from lunch and hopes that no one notices. Maybe you goof off or horseplay with a friend in another department in order to bring joy into the day. Sometimes you steal from the company to get back a few scraps that were originally taken from you. Maybe you'd flaunt the rules of the job by sitting down at a cash register even though you were told to stand. Or buy a coke to drink at your station even though you weren't supposed to have a drink. Or your boss just yelled at you for not working fast enough, so you spit in their coffee.

All of this is a normal part of the working day, that capitalists have to deal with, but these forms of struggle can be done in protest of hours being cut, a friend laid off or the imposition of new draconian rules.[52] All of these unconscious forms of class struggle are in response to a system that steals our labor and makes it inhuman. These forms of resistance can be likened to what E.P. Thompson considered the “moral economy” of the working class. Workers protest their exploitation in order to affirm their traditional rights that have been violated.[53]

However, the struggle takes other conscious forms as well. These can range from sabotage, slowdowns, restricting output, labor union organizing, strikes, creating mutual-aid societies, forming socialist and communist parties, workers’ councils, and even revolutions.[54] While the United States has never had a revolution, it has seen class struggles as fierce as any in the industrialized world, such as strikes of 1877, Haymarket in 1886 and the CIO unionization drives of the1930s, along with high levels of state repression against working-class organizers. Through these struggles, workers have been won to revolutionary ideas and the need to challenge the capitalist system.

B. US working class

Some may say that Braverman writes on ancient history and now we live in a post-industrial age where industrial workers no longer feature prominently. Others, under the cover of “Marxism”, may even claim that the US working class either doesn't exist or is so privileged and bought off due to exploiting workers throughout the Third World that it is incapable of fighting back. We cannot offer in-depth answers or a complete portrait of the working class here, rather just some brief points will be made.

Today, the manufacturing sector no longer forms a majority of the labor force in the United States, in fact more than 75 percent workers are in the service sector, with nearly half of them in office-related jobs. Yet as Joan Greenbaum, a former office worker and professor of computer information systems at CUNY, observes, white-collar workers have seen the growth of their sector slow down with their jobs now offering “lower wages and more part-time slots have picked up”.[55] White-collar workers in fields such as programming, secretaries and education have seen their jobs subjected to the same techniques of scientific management with the development of new technology such as computers, the internet and cellphones. The end result is white-collar and service workers suffer rationalization and deskilling, alongside outsourcing and temporary employment– as capital gains control of the workplace to increase profits.

While de-industrialization has occurred in the United States, we would do well to look at it as the greater rationalization of industry to ensure more production with fewer workers. According to Chris Harman in his book, Zombie Capitalism:

In other words, there is still an industrial working class, alongside service workers, within the United States that makes up a majority of the population.

US workers are not, in their majority, well-off. A brief look at the period before the Great Recession of 2007-8 can illuminate this. From 1970 to 2003, GDP tripled (adjusted for inflation) from $3.7 to $10.8 trillion. During this time, hourly wage and income figures either stagnated or decreased (from $8.99 to $8.29), while the earnings of CEOs increased.[57] In 1970, CEOs earned 49 times as much as an average wage earner. By 2000, that ratio had increased to 2173 to 1.

Not only have the rich grown richer, but the poor have lost out. In 1952, corporate taxes amounted to 32% of all federal tax receipts. By 2003, corporate taxes amounted to 7.4% of tax receipts. From 2001 to 2003, 82 of the most profitable corporations made $102 billion in pretax profits and should have paid $35.6 billion (considering the 35% corporate tax rate). Due to neoliberalism, the wealthy classes are able to avoid paying taxes and increase their profits and power. This growth in ruling-class power has been accompanied by a concerted assault on the working class since the 1970s that has slashed the social safety net and caused a sharp decline in unionization.[58]

The Great Recession revealed some of the underlying fault lines of inequality and class power in the United States. The crisis in the global financial system saw the loss of trillions of dollars and tens of millions of jobs. Yet the US government has handed over trillions in bailouts to the wealthiest 1%, while millions of workers have received little or no relief. According to the Washington Post, since the “recovery” began, more than 95% of income gains have gone to the top 1%.[59] While there has been job growth in the US since the recession, it is in low-wage sectors where workers earn an average of 23% less than their previous jobs.[60]

Far from being affluent, the United States is the most unequal advanced industrialized capitalist country. According to a study released by Political Blindspot in 2013, close to 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, with close to 80% near poverty or below it. This was only slightly mitigated by government programs such as food stamps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Blacks and Hispanics were more likely than Whites and Asians to be among the working poor. In 2011, 13.3% of Blacks and 12.9% of Hispanics were among the working poor, compared with 6.1% of Whites and 5.4% of Asians.”[61]

With an extreme disparity in wealth and power, a recovery that has benefited very few and a government, whether Democratic or Republican Party, committed to maintaining the reigning state of affair, we must conclude: the system is not broken, but rather that it is working exactly as it was designed to. All of this points to the fact that class struggle and the possibilities for revolution remain present within the United States.

Conclusion

Braverman's work put the spotlight back on the labor process and he laid bare the methods of scientific management used to control workers. Labor and Monopoly Capital is not just a work of history, political economy or sociology, but a tool which helps us to understand not only the dynamics of capital on the job and throughout society. It should be a vital part of debates on working-class consciousness and revolutionary strategy.